The Swiss people launched a remarkable initiative in 2000, intended not just to restrict road traffic in Switzerland but to halve it. They collected thousands of signatures and won enough votes for the project to be put to a popular referendum. This failed to change the law, but did win a surprisingly high approval rate: 21.9% of the population voted in its favour.
Moritz Leuenberger, then Swiss minister for transport, said at the time he could not understand the project, since the need for mobility “is simply there”. That may be true, but there is also discontent, even in the distinguished Swiss Council of States. During the debate about traffic, Councillor Thomas Onken addressed a letter to the project, in which he explained that he had “some reservations but also a lot of sympathy” for the proposal.
What does the project mean for the rest of Europe? Must we drive around ever more and ever further? A few years ago writers such as Sten Nadolny and the cultural historian Wolfgang Sachs coined the words “the New Slowness” to open the discussion and make the first effective critique of a society of restless haste. They said that for millennia mankind had to rely on the limited speed of man and animal to get anywhere. Only in the past 200 years have the distances that people can cover expanded dramatically. This expansion has decisively changed our perception of space, landscapes and more generally of space and time. And by now, this expansion seems to be indispensable and irreversible. People have forgotten that care, clarity and reflection require time.
A “distance-intensive” lifestyle has emerged and is taken for granted, at least in modern industrialised societies; it has become a typical way of living shaping attitudes and behaviour for part of the population. A distance-intensive lifestyle means large distances covered in ever-smaller units of time, not only in personal travelling, but by the products consumed. Even in health food shops, Argentinean honey or (...)
